August 15, 2024

Famous Last Words - Part Two

“You’re never gonna see me cry the last goodbye.”

Yes, that title is more than a trifle oxymoronic. But bear with me.

Earlier this month, we looked at the last words of various incarnation of the Doctor, and what they might have in common. (Or not.) All the examples we worked with were lines said by the actor playing the Doctor immediately before their character regenerated into a new incarnation played by a new actor. That was our (my) definition of “last words”. An essentially fiction-based one, that treats a television Doctor’s screen-time as a life and their departure as a death. Famous last words in the Nelson or Oscar Wilde sense.

But there are, of course, other ways of counting “last words”. Even before he returned in 2013 and 2023 David Tennant recorded a whole The Sarah Jane Adventures story, one made after but transmitted before, The End of Time (2009/10) in character. Although Peter Davison recorded his regeneration into Colin Baker on the last day of shooting for The Caves of Androzani (1984) he had to do some running about in cave sets after dying on the TARDIS console room floor.

The same thing had happened to William Hartnell nearly two decades earlier; he’d been transmogrified into Patrick Troughton at the start of recording and then had to shoot the rest of The Tenth Planet (1966) Episode 4 before being allowed to go home.¹ Such is the nature of film and television production. It doesn’t have any impact on what the audience experiences, of course. But it’s another criterion to use for what we’re looking at. Another way of drawing lines.

What does have an impact on the audience, however, is that all of the twentieth century Doctors returned to the role at least once after leaving the show. So we might fairly argue that the last words of Messrs Hartnell to Pertwee should be the last words the audience heard from them in their respective lasts of those returns. For everyone else, the actual last words are still up in the air. Because they can always come back again.

Currently Tom Baker’s last words as Doctor Who² on television are “Who knows?” or possibly “Who Nose” (official subtitles be damned). But that is subject to change, depending on Mr Baker’s health and indeed whims. They could have changed two years ago, but he was uninterested in appearing in The Power of the Doctor (2022) alongside all his twentieth century successors and no fewer than three of the twenty first century Doctors.

The lasts words spoken by Messrs Davison, Baker C, McCoy and McGann in Doctor Who are currently “Good luck, Doctor”. An exhortation to the Jodie Whitaker version of all of them spoken which they all speak simultaneously. More or less. There’s an argument that that should count ahead of the last words from their respective eras anyway, as the versions of their Doctors who appear in The Power of the Doctor are some sort of phantom incarnations that exist inside the current Doctors mind, and have presumably experienced their own “deaths”. If they can remember saying e.g “Physician, heal thyself” then are they really still their last words at all?

You see the problem.

It’s a problem that expands further if you include Tales of the TARDIS (2023). That’s something current Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies has encouraged us to do, calling this delightful spin off of framing sequences “100% canonical”³; and while my own view is that canonicity is inherently an absurdity, if anyone is empowered to make such declarations right now it’s RTD.

Even if one dismisses entirely the very notion of canon, three of Tales of the TARDIS’ seven episodes feature former Doctors returning to their role, and speaking lines in it on telly. Which seems in arguable. Even if Sylvester McCoy’s episode implies that the older Doctors we see are the result of bifurcating timelines⁴ which perhaps renders the whole concept of last words moot.

No, you’re not getting away from me that easily.

If you (we) go with Tales of the TARDIS McCoy’s Doctor’s last onscreen words are “Ow!” in a peculiar echo of his dying scream in Grace: 1999 (1996), Colin Baker’s are “Right, come on then!” while Peter Davison does rather better than both, with the RTD scripted line “In this vault of memories, an ordinary life is one of the most shining things of all.”

You might think it would be simpler for the Doctors whose actors are sadly no longer with us. Not least because we might conclude that, in story terms, any onscreen returns take place before their characters’ deaths in The Tenth Planet, The War Games (1969) and Planet of the Spiders (1974) respectively. So we at least have a straight choice between character and actor. We should be able to say with some certainty that Jon Pertwee’s last words in The Five Doctors (1983), Patrick Troughton’s in The Two Doctors (1985) and William Hartnell’s in The Three Doctors (1972/3) are their Doctors last words.

But it’s arguable that “Good Luck, Doctor” are also the First⁵ Doctor’s current last words. Even though that incarnation was played, in The Power of the Doctor, by David Bradley rather William Hartnell. All the arguments surrounding them being de facto post mortem words apply to this incarnation too; and Bradley had in any case, already had dialogue as the First Doctor in scenes in Twice Upon A Time (2017) set after Hartnell’s own last dialogue in The Tenth Planet.⁶

You see the problem when we fiddle around with the criteria, and slide accidentally from character to actor and back again, sometimes more than once in a single sentence? And it applies to the Third Doctor despite him only ever being played, on television at least, by Jon Pertwee and no one else.

Because after The Five Doctors Pertwee also appeared on television as the Doctor in Dimensions in Time (1993) an almost entirely humourless Children In Need “skit” from which fandom generally recoils. He also did semi in-character appearances on gameshows and adverts, and made two Doctor Who radio serials The Paradise of Death (1993) and Doctor Who and the Ghosts of N-Space (1996) as the sole lead.

So you can go with “I’ll explain later” (from The Five Doctors), “We must pull free!”⁷ (from Dimensions in Time) or “And that means minstrel” (from Doctor Who and the Ghosts of N-Space).⁸ I rather like the last one, not least because it’s genuinely the last line Pertwee delivered as the Doctor, and it has a vague resonance with producer Peter Bryant’s original ambition to have Pertwee play the Doctor as a minstrel type figure. But I suspect fandom as a whole would go with “I’ll explain later”.

In some ways, Patrick Troughton’s final words in Doctor Who are simpler. “Do try and keep out of my way in future and in past, there's a good fellow. The time continuum should be big enough for the both of us. Just.” he snarks at his successor before departing in the TARDIS. It’s a lovely moment, and one that seems on some level to be trying to set up the Troughton Doctor and Jamie as recurring guest characters for the Colin Baker era of Doctor Who.⁹ It’s also not quite what was scripted.

As an actor, Troughton was known for substantially redrafting his own dialogue in delivery, delighting some colleagues and frustrating others. With that response perhaps partially dependent on whether said colleague saw such imprecision as an actorly foible or the result of him being someone with an unconventional personal life and three families to support, who simply worked too much to be able to learn his lines properly. The lines from the rehearsal script are excerpted below.

There isn’t, I don’t think, any real argument that Troughton’s version isn’t more characterful and engaging. But even the rehearsal script version isn’t what was originally written. Onscreen, and in the rehearsal script, the Troughton Doctor summons his TARDIS to basement of the hacienda using a remote control. In the pre-rehearsal draft both Doctors instead mend the damaged Kartz-Reimer time travel capsule so the younger Doctor and Jamie can take it back to the space station where they left the TARDIS all the way back in Part One. Without a couple of rewrites, this could have been Patrick Troughton’s last moment in Doctor Who.

Like Troughton a dozen years later, William Hartnell’s scripted last lines as the Doctor changed on the day he shot them. Although this was not actorly inspiration. On 6 November 1972 William Hartnell shot all his scenes for The Three Doctors at the BBC Television Film Studios at Ealing. The production team knew in advance that Hartnell was not well. That was why he was not taking as full a part in the production as they had originally envisaged, but instead delivering a series of lines to-camera that could be piped into the studio during the recording of the rest of serial, allowing Hartnell’s Doctor to communicate with his future selves and the Time Lords via a series of screens. Doctor Who’s then script editor Terrance Dicks deputised for producer Barry Letts that day and its filming schedule has Hartnell’s Doctor’s last line amended to it onscreen form from the scripted original in Dicks’ distinctive handwriting.¹⁰

It is not hard to imagine Dicks, seeing the ailing Hartnell working through his scenes in story order and tiring as the day went on, realising that the actor’s last words of the day and the serial were likely to also be last of his acting career; and then punching it up ever so slightly to give the original Doctor a proper final bow.

It’s a rare example, I think, of a writer knowingly given an actor something to do in the near certainty that it will be the last thing they say in the signature role of their career; and in the process initiating the tradition, picked up by his twenty first century successors as Doctor Who’s head writer, of paying tribute to actor and character simultaneously.

It’s something that was perhaps still in Dicks mind a decade later, when writing The Five Doctors. There, the First Doctor, played for one night only by Richard Hurndall seems to call back to Hartnell’s final words when he tells the Davison Doctor “It’s reassuring to know my future is in safe hands”. He wasn’t convinced then, but he is now.

As to what endings the future will hold, “Who knows?” to borrow a phrase. But I’d be lying if I said that one of my ambitions wasn’t to live to see Matt Smith as the Curator in the Doctor Who 100th anniversary special on Friday 23 November, 2063.